Microsoft has offered a cut-down, ad-supported free Starter Edition of Office 2010 for quite a while now, but it has only been available pre-installed on netbooks and other low-spec PCs. At the moment, however, you can download the whole thing for free from Microsoft’s servers.
Aside from some language and performance improvements, Microsoft’s web versions of its Office Apps haven’t seen massive changes since their launch last year. That changed a little over the weekend, with the Excel spreadsheet app adding direct printing from within the app and a number of right-click editing options.
Microsoft Word is a handy text processor, but it also has often-forgotten design features built in. Office Expert Helen Bradley walks through how you can use SmartArt feature to create a timeline for project planning.
Need to work regularly with spreadsheets in Excel and find yourself constantly reaching for the mouse? A handful of common keyboard shortcuts can make you much more productive.
Most Excel users will know about the Fill command, which can be used to rapidly copy data and formulas into a group of cells. But there’s also a related option that can make it easy to add selected data: end mode.
Annoyingly, Outlook doesn’t have a built-in backup tool for the PST file which stores all your data. Equally annoyingly, the free backup tool Microsoft supplies doesn’t work with Outlook 2010. Fortunately, you can work around that.
Microsoft officially rolled out its new Office 365 business suite earlier today. How does its pricing compare with its most visible rival, Google Apps?
We’ve told you before about tactics to adjust to the Ribbon interface in Microsoft Office, including customising the Ribbon to make finding the features you want more straightforward. A new downloadable tab called ‘Favorites’ groups together the most commonly-accessed features according to Microsoft’s analysis of user click patterns, which might represent a good starting point for your own customisations.
Dear Lifehacker, I have Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 installed on my PC but I have found that I’m not using anything more than Word and Excel. I’m wondering if there is a way to uninstall the applications I’m not using (Powerpoint, Access, OneNote and so on) without completely uninstalling the lot and doing a fresh install? Thanks, Office Clutter
First, a good taste warning: this post mentions Clippy, the irritating helper paperclip that Microsoft thankfully dumped from Office back in Office XP. If the mere mention of that digital excrescence doesn’t send you running to the hills screaming for gin, then you might want to check out Ribbon Hero 2, a game designed to teach migrating Office users how to use the Ribbon found in Office 2007 and Office 2010.
